ABSTRACT
Marcel's Cellar was, as the name implies, the nostalgia of a group of restless young people for the Left Bank Paris of the brief experience of one or two and the imagination of the others. In the idea of the place there met, vaguely as could only happen thousands of miles away from the actuality, the garret of Mimi and Rudolph in the eighties and one of the cafés where Sartre characters talked. Even the name of the “owner” was in character, if out of date—but this was pure fortunate coincidence that Marcel du Toit's name, common among Afrikaans South Africans with their mixed Huguenot-Dutch antecedents as Smith or Robinson among people of English descent, should be so appropriately romantic. He himself was a willowy, shady character, who with less pretensions would have been running a side show in a traveling fun fair, and, indeed, he presided over his cellar with an air of extreme languid dissipation that was clearly his underworldly bohemian version of the robust flourish he would have used for The Greatest Show on Earth.
